kde, linux, busses, open source and the good old Grateful Dead.
I never did get a music subscription of any kind. Guess I am glad about that now. I just host my own server. Spotify never had a quarter of what I want to listen to anyways so I guess there is that.
Listening to Legion of Mary 12-10-1974 right now.
Thank goodness. I hate most current UI.
It’s funny that one thing I really liked about it was the floating windows and toolbar. Then everyone complained and they brought it all together. But now people I work with using software that we pay nearly a million dollars to license are getting all excited becuase they introduced… floating windows.
At that point you might as well go with a steamdeck. Works with or without the mouse/keyboard/screen and can play games. The desktop environment is full kde and ready to go.
Pyrosis did a great job answering a lot of your questions, I will focus again on why I cannot recommend plex:
Opt-In is not acceptable. You need to opt-out of: data sharing, data sharing with partners (unless you are in the UK or specific States), sharing playback data, stopping discovery together and activity feed, and turning off all of their live tv and streaming services.
Sharing streaming habits with others is not something that ever should have been opt-out. They keep pushing the line.
By the way, several of the “features” you mention are not included by default. Hardware decoding, downloads, DVR, etc.
I run both concurrently. I have a plex pass from way back when, maybe a decade or more.
What plex is now is not what it once was. Trying to socialize viewing habits, opting in by default to analysis, ads, reviews, and sharing that info has gone too far. Plex also works on these features such as discovery which benefits them, instead of open bugs.
That us why I can’t recommend it.
As for a feature comparison. Jellyfin is snappier, and faster. Plex is more detailed in their interface, and has better Metadata. Jellyfin sometimes doesn’t restart where I left off. Jellyfin is much, much better on mobile devices, but has less clients for tv’s. Jellyfin doesn’t rely on any server but my own, where plex wants to authenticate with thier own servers and ask for accounts (and money) to have full functionality. Jellyfin always downloads to a client. Plex…might. Plex has better handling of multiple streams in one file.
Because they are doing things in their best interest and not the end user.
As so many like to say here the enshitification is happening.
If you want to self host, plex isn’t it.
This milestone was reached a long time ago. For some reason uncle bobs Facebook post has been just as reliable a media source as any other for a lot of people already.
Please:
My windows laptop does not want to conserve the battery, or use an 80% charge. It instead relies on a third party piece of software - typically the manufactures - that drags in all sorts of crap I do not want, with Eula’s I do not agree with. Linux doesnt do that, and properly preserves my battery. I don’t know whats wrong with your Mint install or laptop, but I have a laptop I put linux on 10 years ago, and it still works great and the battery is still within 95% of new, which frankly is amazing. Never had windows on it. And of course you can configure all of that with a GUI.
My other laptop had windows on it, and the intel driver would turn off features in my wifi card because I had not paid for that version. In linux it was a full feature wifi card.
My printer wont work with windows, even though it is supposed to be a windows printer. The drivers, which won’t install, even if they did will pull in a bunch of crap, and Eulas that I do not agree with. On my linux machine it just works. No drivers needed.
In Windows, it nearly bricked my Video card trying to update firmware from a driver update I did not ask for. Had to force a new driver, which in turn updated firmware. And once again, said driver adds a ton of crap and services and a Eula I do not want. On my Linux machine, it just works, AND does not require me to manage drivers at all. AMD.
I am not sure what you are trying to say about Excel, that is just a confusing sentence.
For me the world is the opposite. Linux is easy and just works. Windows is the pain in my ass and always does something annoying (exactly like this article is saying).
I daily drive Linux. Have for years. I choose to only remote into widows, and that is only if someone will pay me to do it. I have an MSDN and all MS software available to me, and even when it is free to me, I would rather not use it.
I will not change on this: an official wiki (for example the arch wiki) or other documentation is still the best way to convey exact information. If a user absolutely never wants to use a command line, then they can use Android and a touch interface. Even Microsoft gives directions on how to fix things with a command line. This should be infrequent, but is a necessity for brevity and precision.
In any case we might as well put that to rest and move on.
When I have a working example that does at least something we can go from there. The bullet points are helpful, thank you.
It is not strange or difficult. I am not expecting them to know what to type, I am expecting to have clear instructions as to exactly what they need to type. Which is really hard to convey with a gui. Administration of a computer and sharing functions is so much faster by copy/paste exactly what you expect them to. It is the easiest, most concise method.
In any case: lets get back to the task at hand. I will make a simple GUI that creates the credentials file, the mount point file, the automount file, and finally restarts the system daemon.
I guess it needs to show any errors at that time.
The user will provide some info that I will gather as it goes along (like SMB credentials) and I guess I will include the ability to simply go on without mounting if the network mount point is not available (in case of laptop).
There are a few elevations of privileges to sort out, and to keep it simple I will use Kdialog (for the gui presentation) which will make the code very obvious as it is simply bash behind it all.
After that do you want me to share this with you? I am not sure when I will get it done, but it should be fairly easy. Then I can put it on github I guess.
Realistically, to make this functional, it should be able to ready your current mount points and allow the user to edit, doing error checking etc. That would be a future phase.
There is a reason Digikam can’t rely on the SMB connection that dolphin makes. I do the same with my Music library and make it permanent mount at boot.
The command line fails hugely on usability, learnability and familiarity.
No. It EXCELS at usability and learnability. Because it works the same every time. It is shareable, teachable, and precise. GUI’s are sloppy, difficult to explain and tell people what to click on. Difficult for them to explain how to get back to where they were if they get lost.
Repeatable is not what a GUI is good for.
I will say it might be nice if there was a pattern that could be reused, for example if a distro wanted to plan for it. Then again, you are connecting to SMB (windows) share, so the importance is fairly low.
I am looking at a mount now, and it is tempting to make a default file, walk through the questions necessary to create everything, and then execute it. It is only a handful of lines to make the mount point, and then a systemd command to mount with out needing to edit fstab.
So somehow they have created and managed SMB sharing in their local environment, but can’t figure this out?
Simply having a SMB share available is just a simple click in dolphin and then you can bookmark it. Easy enough.
For a permanent share (like with Digikam expects) takes a few extra steps, but they are not terribly hard.
I am a bit taken aback with the terms you use: “use some command line or other nerdy hack, with magic words…that shouldnt be necessary in the first place” is over the top annoying. Yes use the command line. That is the easiest way to explain and perform things. Dozens of pictures of clicking things, or a simple direct command that is copy able and repeatable. I will take the latter.
Why would you call telling you computer what to do a “nerdy hack”? This is not “broken usability”, it is efficient. Why do you have such a negative reaction to using a computer in an easy way?
I will say it is a few steps to mount at boot, as you will need to add to fstab, create a access file, and so on. Part of that is linux security. I am not sure how that could be wrapped into a gui, but I suppose it would not be too hard to do, with a need to elevate privileges. If you think this is a barrier to entry, would you be interested in writing this gui?
Ok so there isn’t a gui, but mounting a share at boot is not that hard… seems weird to say it can be done but not the way I want to do it, so I dont.
We mock crypto because anyone who has it wants to hoard it as an “investment”. Nobody wants to use it as a currency.
I tried for years, buying and selling goods with crypto. I never purchased any crypto, I just earned it. I tried to talk others into the same. You need to spend to have value… they just laugh and day hold your bags tight with diamond hands.
Yeah, it’s never going to work.
I have a roku, and I gotta ask… what ads? I think they run one on the side at the menu screen but I never even notice it. Because the only time i am on that screen is to get to a channelm
Then when something isn’t playing it just goes to the aquarium screen saver.
What are you doing that had so many ads?
If you want to talk about how chatty the damn things are with their servers, yes that is an issue.
I find that Firefox manages tabs better. So eveb though i use side tabs on vivaldi, I prefer them on top in Firefox, and it’s just a keystroke away to see the list vertically, but not stay that way.
Nope, not really. If you have a list of files you single click on the name, not the icon. That selects it. No dragging.
Single click is so much better. Vastly superior.
How do I live? Without carpal tunnel.
Windows had it for ages
Windows single click never worked right. I don’t use the little check box or selection. I use both Windows and Linux, and windows stays in Double click even though I have been doing single on KDE since as long as I can remember.
Strawberry or Clementine. I mean 100K entries in a database is nothing. Even for SQLite. You can add multiple library locations, this is no problem.
You probably want Strawberry as it is newer and maintained, but I still like Clementine for the extra features that Strawberry doesn’t have yet. For you probably, not a big deal - things like podcast support, cloud support etc.